William Blake's prophetic art and poetry
Copyright 2005 David Whitmarsh-Knight. This blog is an important component of www.thefourzoas.com and the ideas within copyrighted. No part can be used without unambiguous and specific permission from the author of this web-site. My thanks to Jody Shipley for his freely given web work...his generosity and commitment to the enhancement of his students and friends is acknowledged and deeply appreciated.

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Wednesday, 10 December 2008

the prophet? Blake sees prophecy as speaking out

10 years of stagnant median wages while profits pork barrel their chairman/ceo bonused way to today. there it is oh battered brothers and sisters...the wealthiest group of economic midwives in history have delivered poverty.

Blake's a man who sees this. He makes art out of this. Gives us a discourse not cranked out by greed.

I have done some further thinking on Blake's art. Gave a truly pleasurable lecture for the Blake Society ....the subject was the plot of Blake's Jerusalem.... and I gave another a week later in the City.... on the 'new' Jerusalem and London. The Blake enthusiasts at the Society were such a joy to meet. Not that the conference in the City was less enjoyable, I focused on Blake's art for the different audience.

That takes me on to the next phase in my work on Blake. The Four Zoas is currently being edited. The main body of the study finished and peer-reviewed...I am writing the final verision of the introduction now. It should be published in a month or three.

Blake's art must follow I think. I have not included the art in my two studies. First, the studies are massive enough already....and the art cannot be properly understood without the two very different myths and the two very different plots known. My study of Blake's art follows my understanding of his myths.

Sunday, 1 June 2008

This blog looks at Blake's use of spinning and weaving the strings of finitude

Urizen/Temple, Vala and the iron spindles. That is the brief focus here.

opening reasonably......what 'type' or ideology of knowledge is signified here?

Blake’s two-fold compass points: north/ south/ east/ west…It is also true, given the significance of Ahania in The Four Zoas, that Blake enters a fresh dimension of zoa/emanative myth in Jerusalem for Ahania, Tharmas and Enion and Orc are far less evident. Tracing the plots of these epics in Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained show why.

There is no ONE plot and often there is no ONE text. the Dirridean monotone of no beginning and no end to any text turns mono-textuality into a straw dummy. Tzara in the Dadist Manifesto Cafe Voltaire is where Derrida sits. Two generations earlier. Leotard? The same.

There is a logical self-contradiction here...think of a university...i live in cambridge so the university here will do...there is no such THING as the University of Cambridge....there is this college or that college or the library or the grad-pad but no single thing that is a distinct object that can be shown as THE University of Cambridge. The University is a mental abstract too...it exists as a coherence differently in the mind of every person who thinks of it and may not exist in other minds at all. It has a reality that is entirely linguistic too. It is also legal entity ... and so forth.

Likewise a text. ..the alledged meaning depends on the idealogy of the poet as seen, heard, spoken of, shown or written about by critic... and its value lies in its coherence, even if like Ault et al, the only coherence is its incoherence... which is paradoxically the coherent argument made about an apparently constructed incoherence. each post modernist has THE plan his/her limited response of the moment. because, there must be one even if.... as Derrida echoed... it is improvisation. Else Freud has no merit at all. The unity of each intelligence is infinitely existent.

i do not conform to the recent 'post' modern school of, for examples, ault, pierce, dortort rothenberg, lincoln, otto and others. while all are studies full of insights, i show to my mind, that none understand the coherence of Blake's levels of vision language and visualisation outside of two-fold life....indeed they claim Blake is without coherent narrative structure, is fractal, self-subversive, weirdly self-destructive and randomly unsystematic.

four-fold love is the infinite within and the infinite without…. 94-96...

the 'New' Jerusalem' descends in Chapter 4, or Beulah, in three-fold unity of head, heart and loins...the restoration of Jerusalem's infinite physicality prepares Albion's interiority for Christ's second coming.

For Blake,| Swedenborg is two fold vision and symbolism. Blake's use of Swedenborg should be interpreted as 'cleansing two-fold vision. otto gives a fine study of The Four Zoas and swedenborg. but his reading is self-confined to a seeing of Blake's two-fold seeing as 'all seeing'.

One essential difference between one two three and fourfold seeing in Blake, is Blake's 'theology of atonement'...

based on the dogmatic fact of unconditional forgiveness as expression of Christ as the law, and the fulfillment of all law…for Blake, Christ is 'the why' of the commandment to love…love god and love the other... in fourfold unity

For Blake, suffering is real.... it must be... and death too is real; else there is no real love or real faith or real (i.e. infite) life.

As Tim Heath (Blake Society) put it, through Blake's art we are in the 'company of Blake'...and in his 'company' of language and art we are always self-transcending in the otherness within and without....to my mind Blake wrote for years to give a visual discourse the purpose of which is a finger pointing outside of itself in compassion for the other, and his art and epic myth an adumbration of the second coming of Christ....striving with systems to dissolve systems.…

the systems are signified by Blake’s geometry for it manifests vision and form

… it’s a not simply an abstraction or a metaphor. He symbolizes architectures of feeling and physicality...he signifies a two fold Ulro and Generation, and, a three fold Eden and Beulah….we see two fold rocks and temples, and,threefold, we see Golgonooza…(onefold is death and fourfold is unity with God.…

and, we have a spectre to measure the first, and, we have a threefoldprophetic forge of spirituality of Los for three fold life...the furnaces re-forge the twofold into threefold life energy, that is then given sublime forms in the emanative looms of Enitharmon and their daughters in Cathedron, which is a portion of Golgonooza …in Cathedron, nature or life is woven into an emanative unity in ‘fibres’ of beauty and love beneath the thresholds of human perception…

the sublime world thus formed is that into which we see the descent of the New Jerusalem, and she is the cleansed finite for the second coming. three-fold Jerusalem...and two-fold Vala; always the one gives souls, the other bodies that are born live and die.

Thus, in the two worlds that Blake makes female, the first, Chapter 3, is finite and Blake gives us Generation in which world Blake gives us the incarnation. In the second female world, Chapter 4, Beulah, we have the cleansed generative female energies, that allows the descent of the New Jerusalem that, in turn, immediately prepares and cleanses Beulah for the second coming and, in turn, Albion's re-awakening in Beulah in Plates 94-100.

There is a beautiful structural balance between the female worlds...as there is a beautiful structural balance between the male worlds. This structure is not possible to the two fold limits of the post-modern Blake school of Ault et al.

SO TO MOVE TO THREE FOLD AND FOUR FOLD

Blake and possibility. the quantuum fields of information in Blake.

An example in modern philosophy of science follows. I can’t and do not need to follow the maths/geometry of it, but the geography is essential…I was thinking about reason and science. Freedom from systems.

I was reading Wheeler, the 96 year old physicist who died last week. Writes of four Levels and the physics of sentience. In 1998 he had a brief paper/correspondence in his book Geons, Black Holes and Quantum Foam. (Norton 1998) He and his colleagues write of the philosophy of science of it….in their language, it means sentience is a Level 3 and property of non-material‘reality’ or quantum information field… and in Level 3 everything is information…love, commitment, creativity and imagination, intentionality, sense of humour, self-transcendence and appreciation of beauty of creation are ‘physical guiding fields of quantum information outside of Level 1’.Material quantum field of Level 1 ties in here with Newton and Urizen.Wheeler quotes Libet …‘the mind chooses backward in time while, simultaneously experiencing its conscious choice forward in time’

THEN ……he moves into Merkebah mysticisism, Ezekiel’s chariot and quotes Blake extensively. This takes us straight into the work of Rowland, kabbalah of Spector and Van Kleeck and the related exploration of beauty by Sklar, and her view beauty is salvic...that takes courage and love.

to read Blake in a post quantum world, we need appreciation of the non-material quantum of Level 3 ...and Level 3 is sentient indefinable and experiential and implies Blake's perceptions of both art and the human form divine as he named it.

Not unlike Polkinghorne and the god's eye view of the 'block universe'. This modern post-quantuum philosophy is two-hundred +++ years after Blake…it's essential for Blake's levels of inspiration and mythic credibility. Blake is not limited to Ptolemaic or Newtonian or Einsteinian paradgyms...

it makes sense to read and see Blake as a quantum mythologist: myth before maths.

Wheeler finds 4 levels of the real. Not unlike Blake’s four-fold genius in a modern metaphoric parallel. (Wikapedia a helpful source here …Hypercube and hypersphere). Illuminating Blake’s real though indefinable and eternal renewal in four-fold splendour.

The hypercube/sphere allows an image like Golgonooza, Blake has such a grasp of perception, in fr coffey’s words, ‘universal though concrete passing beyond the level of psychological description’

I look at it very early on for a few like paragraphs only in Jerusalem Explained. I’d like to read more studies, but it’s not a major focus. By and large Ault is limited to Newton. He sees two-fold and its limits. Then, detailing bit and pieces, asserts his accumulated notes and seems to assert his notes as the literary and visual boundaries of Blake's craftsmanship. .... these limits are his limits.

i think it shown in Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained that Blake is a far better poet than Ault's methodology allows.

Jerusalem Explained and The Four Zoas Explained help today's readers and scholars working in Blake's narrative levels and plot. For a concluding example for this note: I suggest an entirely fresh/new reading in which there is envisioned a three-fold Golgonooza...and, a two-fold Canaan and Urizen's Temple that is a two-fold prophetic history/myth.

the history/myth both symbolises and narratively allows the virgin birth and the crucifixion and second coming ...

Structurally supporting this reading,

1. Golgonooza is the major city/building in Chapter 1 (male and finite;

2. and the major building in Chapter 2 is the Christ built Tomb of Albion (male and infinite);

3. Urizen's Temple and stone of sacrifice is the great structure of Chapter 3 (female and finite)

and 4. in Chapter 4 it is the New Jerusalem (female and infinite).

The importance of these four architectures/buildings are structurally vital and unexplored critically out side of Jerusalem Explained. I'm writing an article now however,it seems critically true to claim Blake crafts a coherent and thematically inter-connected and integrated dialogue of non material and material being in the four-fold 'web' of his story.

For Blake the sexual dynamics of male and female compose the physicality of both infinite and finite being.

Wednesday, 30 April 2008

I have re-introduced the search lines to the front of the blog. the first point i'd like to make is that the 100 Plates of Jerusalem, and the line-by-line analysis therein can be individually called up in my website thefourzoas.com

The search lines are here for research students and interested Blake readers..............or those who want Blake's The Four Zoas 'explained' or Jerusalem 'explained' in detail... or want to understand Blake's art more profoundly. Blake's art is embedded in his myths and thus his myth, symbol and story not understood, Blake's art is also poorly understood. My studies are about making sense of Blake's mythology. his myth, also thought of as his sublime allegory, (wittreich) has to be realised in the perceptions of readers and viewers....in a like manner, myth and symbol is necessary to realise the iconic, typological and allegorical meanings of classical or renaissance art. likewise the geometry of composition is typically sacred such as in the theology of the ikon in bizantine art, its sacred geometry of internal symmetries and colours, and from the earliest, sacred architecture...and that means the indigenous circle builders and their clarity of astronomical alignments and so time.

an essential methodological principle is that there are many swirls of myths in Blake's mythology of Albion's fall and redemption... dynamic 'vortices' involved in multi inter engagements in multi complexities... foucault like vortices of them all as a whole in unity...such are the torus-like vortices of Albion's inner collapse... and there is no final definition until Plates 94-100.

Blake's depictions of mental energies are profound. It is a commonplace amongst Blake's audiences and analytic thinkers that he develops a causal cosmology of mental energies, events and materiality that is of extraordinary value to to our understanding of human consciousness itself. his value is enhanced by his universality...though he is christian, his readers need not be.

Though he sees a four-fold unity with Christ, others may see that Blake symbolises a 'god's eye' concept of time and space such outlined by polkinghorne(I discuss this in the opening chapters to Jerusalem Explained). Jungian and Freudian critics have long seen Blake's work as revealing that which otherwise is unrevealed even unconscious... his impact upon art is formidable. Blake's remarkable poetic re-creations of mind and processes of dream and waking self-revelation are known as very valuable... god or no god so to speak.

Saturday, 26 April 2008

To the Southwark of The Globe, The Swan and The Fortune, the bear pit and the taverns and happyhouses and the the Blakeless Bride. The genius of Southwark? The cleric failed to see the chances are few for the pounding heartbeat of self kenosis in art and love and life in Southwark, and the jewel of Blake's hymn, Jerusalem.

no flower once picked grows back however strong the stem

her got done too, sent backfailed to meet the something ...Off the list nowBreath-bated and clogged-ears in the charity camps

Banjos in the tunnels by the air blastscloth caps tin cups coinsand a wild-eyed child with a dummyin a crowd of kneecaps and pounding feet.

Airless hairless and eyelessand groaning in Gaza the lot of usNot a temple to think onnor jaw-bone to recall.

There's an asteroid on its way as big as GibraltarGalileo's under house arrestCrime pays, rules taxans superheated lava fills the caverns left by gas wells

the round glass circles of the cathedral rosesand grounded mazes give hopethere's rumours of oxygen outside the windows of the worldstars do last longer than poverty, says the vatican, Infallibly.

But eternity's an idea that experiences nothingNothing of the bone-cold concrete dirtof a rough shaveless lifein the midst of surplus waste

Saturday, 19 April 2008

this a fourth verse about the cleric of Southwark who banned Blake's Jerusalem, Blake saw Jerusalem as the bride of Christ which is a reasonable model for any one... methinks.Now the disappointment is honey mooned into the future life of the bride i pen a further poemlives about the young and the struggle of it ...

psychic clay not to be mined or thrown on a wheel

it's hard to keep faithin the coffee-grind and sweaty hair of cappuccino time,for a hard-breathing-clear eyed idealistwith firm thighs and a pert blouse that bounces

a teacher who like her and a third world feelingfor eye treatment radio and a well for village lifeprey to the faith-in-loving lyricsthe truly lazy offer

two bedrooms more and a larger lawnhabits like parking in front lead lined windowseyes reddening in shadows and swirl of curtain, andwell-fed waiting crying poor-mouth to make taste rich

the pretty girlfingers straight as a check out keyblinks back the long grimed dayand the longer struggle of a loving heart

she knows how long it really takesto dig a veggie patch on a wet spring dayand the Kremlin tower of a leek flowerworking to give a kitchen the smell of heaven

and granny's old mahogany bedthe thump of life they all said she loved

Tuesday, 15 April 2008

She never saw beauty she was put awayfolded like linen with skins of ironmagicked memories celibate idealsand angels dancing up and down laddersmassaging the conscience of the world

The older we are the closer to timelessness,Helen's lovely legs have yet to reach full stretchnot yet closed in the mercy of an unseeing eye.

Surprising where the last ditch stands arewhere certain people are that's wherewho simply fight until they simply die.

I don't wish to pass through any of your doorsshe told each keeper of the keys in turn passing out the gatesby the smell of food tables and cowls bent forwardaround her the temple keeperscrouched like stone lions waiting for Alexander.

Saturday, 12 April 2008

Buzz buzz the see-sawback and thrust slip-slide-slip-sliderock-a-billy trombone callto the glittering fantasia of young flesh and belly bouncers of dancein the bumble stumble of the gene circus

Do you really want the fast food job that's every job?want to sell and sell and chime the hour for a clocked amount?while higher and higher the bonus for the bossin the crime regulatedtick-tock number flash of taxation legislation

Do you really need this crap as the pretty girl's toothpastelarger than a bill board's faithlessnessgives you the weather?Without god sex or money there is only the weatherand the melting of the icecaps

The higher the rank the easierthe sun-tanned cock-a-doodle-doo of glad stock tidingspaddling down the morning rivers of laundered plentycrowing excellence is the greatest threat tothe survival of the richest

So my bonused beautiesbubbling in banquets and stemmed glassescheck out the inside run of long crossed legsin the snake and ladder cocktailsof the davy jones casino

Thursday, 21 February 2008

In William Blake's Jerusalem Explained you will be reading Blake's vision of a anglo-celtic, north European (and its diaspara) vision of Christianity.

He deconstructs the mediterranean centered prejudices of history once thought true now now seen as recidivism........for example 'flat-earth' histories, pre-darwinian concepts of time, evolution and science, set chronologies of creation, economic abuse and the sexual repression of women and their sexual abuse, as in prostitution and mere pleasure, the abuse of innocence in child labour and slavery and sacrifice of the human form Divine, of the god within, for power and money.

Likewise Blake saw war as the consequence of closed shells of consciousness... he symbolised these closed 'prisons' of perception, giving twenty-seven of them, which with the final boundaries of finitude make twenty-eight 'churches' of perception. Blake' s shapings of mental entities and core energies engages his audience in a remarkably practical engagement with real suffering and real collapse and renewal. Blake's commitment to his idea of christian prophecy was profound; it was the mission of art to bear witness in a manner not unlike the ikon and its theology of witness inwhich Christ breaks through the self-created inner shells of human perception. Blake's myth bears witness of Christ infinitely transcending within and without.

.........Blake's visionary spirituality is anglo-celtic. it is essential to see he consciously crafts a vision inspired by prophetic origins antecedent to the invited-to-britain-and-soon sent home augustine.

late millenium papal christianity, post roman, came together with indigenous anglo-celtic christianity. Of course there was inter-communion... throughout east, centre, west, north and southern (egyptian christianity c.f. beatty/bodmer fragments of NT c.200 c.e.).

heresies were not not part of anglo-celtic practice...c.f. Gildas the Wise and his hatred of the 'arian poison' as he calls it ...or marcion. The normans completed the accommodation of anglo-celtic christianity with papal religious and secular authority. the weight of church support for william is typically understated in 1066 and all that...Blake's myth is northern and western european, and its origins shared by augustine though its expression fully contemporary.

on the other hand, it is equally essential to know reading Blake means we do see rome as the centre, not as the east... and not as the west... for 'all roads lead to rome'.......further, clearly when they left Jerusalem after the crucifixion..... Peter and Paul did not 'go west... there's gold in them thar seven hills' as i put it elsewhere. .....they went to the centre called rome....(and yes... there was and is gold in those seven hills..... unimagined wealth)....it is beyond philosophical doubt and archaeological dispute that the west was the tin isles of thucidites, ... eventually called england, ireland, scotland and wales. (see below, 2007)...DNA studies and studies of 'saxon' burial sites show the western isles were a genetically homogenous indigenous civilisation that remained reasonably intact before the romans came and after the romans left... including 'migrations' from europe. modern archaeology proves 'England' did not collapse into a dark ages in which the celts were driven into cornwall and wales, for example kent was not conquered by a pagan saxon invasion. genes show kent to be as anglo-celtic as cornwall or wales or scotland, and strontium/oxygen levels in teeth of 24 skeletons from 5th - 7th cent a.c.e...confirm the genetic studies... (Sykes, Goldstein, Oxford 2002, 2005; Budd, Durham, Antiquity 2008; BBC Seven Ages of Britain TV series). it seems small-scale immigration that adopted and adapted. It does seem there were movements within england but that 'less than half of paternal input' was diue to 'anglo-saxon migration' concludes Goldstein. The pagan dark ages is now seen as replacement history and as such fails the criteria of truth necessary for revelation theology, which must always reform itself in the light of historical facticity to avoid heresy.

we need begin the literary journey of Blake's 'golden thread' knowing we read of Blake's religious understandings of the new Jerusalem....that Blake draws immediately from Swedenborg's 'New Jerusalem' as is well known and researched (see viscomi, Marriage of Heaven and Hell). He also drew from the earliest discourses of spirituality, symbolism, vision and prophetic inspiration (frye bloom percival bentley bloom percival lincoln rowland et al)... the meta summary of these scholars conclusions begins with Blake's tradition as a necessary critical departure point.

I discuss Blake's poetic story and his spiritual realities of a new Jerusalem in Chapter 4, especially Plate 86, of Jerusalem Explained. I have found is not possible to expand our critical perception of Blake's new Jerusalem without the philosophical pre-condition of knowing it in as exact a mythic context as is possible. I analyse Blake's religious moral and economic symbolism in Jerusalem.... and conclude we clearly see a fully developed and articulated myth in Blake's 'jeweled' setting for the new Jerusalem.

I have put these search line below for elements of my research...... and for those those who want to understand Blake's story as an aesthetic whole, 'simply' explained in terms of Blake's fundamentally symbolic meaning of Jerusalem and the new Jerusalem.....and for those who want Blake's plots, myth, story and characters re-presented as developed and set in exquisitely precise narrative context...........and those who want to see in ways similar to Blake when writing...that means in terms of Blake's one-fold, two-fold, three-fold and four-fold states of perception.

There is a need to be very specific here...looking outward..one-fold cannot see two-fold...which cannot see three-fold'... which cannot see four-fold...looked at again but going inwards...four-fold can see three-fold... which can see two-fold... which can see one-fold which cannot see anything but it self. Seeing with Blake is the journey of his descent into himself and the transformation in time to a renewal into unity...a unity purged of that which thought it self divine. it is not strictly a return, not a cycle that is back to where it began...

I trace Blake's four organising vortices of being... enter Blake's clearly defined narrative levels or points of view... engage the reader in his dramatic tension and use of irony... and present as a critical whole Blake's literary perception of humanity's tragic fall, cleansing and and redemption...

.... again none of Blake's states of vision are properly grasped without a grasp of the work as a whole, and in turn that needs a proper textual analysis according to the science of textual criticism. that is make much more possible by my two books.

Wednesday, 20 February 2008

When i lectured in an institute of education/teachers college (as head of school: liberal arts and sciences) we ensured we taught future educatrs that children must physically turn their heads one side right, and, the other side left when they cross a road, because the child has not developed peripheral, perceptual, vision and literally cannot perceive the cars coming from either side. So they walk out, suddenly, for if there is no car immediately in front of them they cross. This is an example of ‘restricted field articulation’....the child’s ability to scan is perceptually restricted, and their behaviour thereby modified, sometimes fatally. Moral scanning is concomitant.

Universally we experience restricted scanning. Without it we could not be an evolving identity, grow or age. Simply put, in love we transform our perceptions to scan in beauty and hope and joy within and without around us. By contrast, in fear, poverty, pain, confinement and depression, fear and anxiety are perceived, threat is universal and the spin or ‘vortex’ of such scanning leads to inwardness, paranoia and self-harm or harm to others. We say we can ‘turn things around’ by scanning more and more positive events and realities in our individual ‘vortex’. Blake calls the ‘spin’ about us a vortex. The vortex expands and contracts within and without us. His epics symbolise how his continuum of improved practical scanning of all he perceive is possible. His work helps show how his understandings led to his self-realisations in art and life.

Now we turn to Blake’s Jerusalem. He seeks to enhance our perceptual field articulations, and as with all great art, he succeeds. In Blake’s aesthetics art enhances individual perceptions. He is perfectly clear; to him the purpose of being is unity with God. We survive and improve our lives through love and hate, food and shelter, justice, art, science, feeling and thought, and above all through others, living in the image of God, which Blake called the human form Divine, best expressed in Plates 94-100

Blake’s genius in Jerusalem and The Four Zoas engages us in the movements of mind and perceptual scanning of consciousness within and without to a degree of comprehensiveness and insight not found in others. while he is profoundly christian his work explores human consciousness in ways comprehensive and universal.... for brief examples, we learn from Blake of the intricate mechanisms and articulations of the mind in process of birth, love, death, time and being ...we see his depiction of the multi-levelled action and reaction of act... and we perceive his unequaled symbolising of the fragmentation of consciousness, its levels of psychosis and healing ,and its integrations into reconciled unities

William Blake’s Jerusalem is a long and brilliant epic. Here is my conclusion: it will probably take a year or so to read Jerusalem; a reading target of one plate a day is racing through the work. How many books offer that kind of self-enhancement…in order that we might perceive more deeply and further? That is Blake’s gift to us all and his art expands our personal perceptual scanning. IIt's taken me a decade or so to decipher and then write Blake’s Jerusalem Explained and likewise, earlier, Blake's The Four Zoas Explained. It has taken that kind of determined effort to outline his story clearly. He is not impenetrable. These two epic books on Blake's christian myth will transform your perceptions of Blake's mastery of his mediums; Blake’s art and his poetry. It should help clarify Blake's explicit trinitarian christianity and his implicit and explicit visionary grasp of spiritual truths of human existence, nature, time and eternity

Once a reader has been through Blake’s myth from beginning to end then Blake reads swiftly and brilliantly, and we share great poetry, philosophy, drama and participate in a spiritual vision that spans, scans and re-engages us with the internal landscapes of our consciousness. As I write elsewhere, the reader is liberated into the practical act of reading an excellent story. Blake is well worth the effort needed to come to terms with his remarkably contemporary picture of humanity.

Saturday, 16 February 2008

Looking through blogs.... it has been William Blake's Jerusalem Explained published by The William Blake Press and nothing else since last october.............so ignore the last several posts to read about extensions of the literary philosophy and methodology of analysis of Blake's Jerusalem. go back to april 07 in the blog

deconstructionism has been my focus....namely the connection between word and word, i've recalled the word logia...........avoiding imposition of preconceived system on Blake's system. the emergent meanings structured on architectures of possible meanings......kabbala.....classical....paracelsus... ossian and the gothic.... longinius and the sublime...moor and his hindu pantheon....bacon hobbes newton locke hume....the french enlightenment and the humanists....dante....swedenborg....boehme ..... the great chain of being as in 'the bard'......deism.....astrology......the industrial revolution and Blake's london, the french and american revolution ....the influences of paine, godwin and early feminism wollstonecraft....slavery, child labour and abuse, mercantalism, mendel and the prisons and (c.f.1797-1834, essay on population and the workfare/workhouse discourse ending in the poor act, 1834)...marxism...jung/freud/lacan...barthes ...derrida...linguistic analysis...foucauld... gramsci... structuralism, modernism and post-modernism....semiotics and the philosophy of the sign and grammatical studies.... even, i read, Blake's autodidacticism (an unconvincing theory holding that Blake was basically self-taught, which Bentley shows incorrect, that seems to suggest that Blake's poetry was 'automatic writing') and discourse and meta-analysis..... and every approach is full of insight. I replace none....I add Blake's plot or logia, the structure he consciously created and the myth he wrote, worked out in all its symmetrical beauty.

instead of conventional mediteranean mythic sources (as in homer, virgil, dante and more immediately, milton's Paradise Lost, Regained or Comus and the cambridge platonists) the weight of meaning Blake shaped into inter-related concepts and sounds was 'key-stoned' or set in a unique semiotic/semantic units like Alla....Ulro....Adan-Udan....the gate of the heart....the cup of Rahab....Entuthon Benethon....Bowlahoola.....Golgonooza.........and personality after personality....Tharmas......Enitharmon.....Palamabron....Bromion....the daughters of Beulah... all empty of pre-determined meaning save for the diachronic and sychronic meanings that are strictly contextual in Blake's myth and confined in its meaning to his linguistic seriality.....concepts like shadow.....shade....spectre....are a third micro family of sign....Blake's geography is yet another...Bath... London... Jerusalem... Babylon... Shiloh... England. These form vortices of resemblances and energy identities. In Blake's poetic method each 'minute particular' is always self-transcending in the ongoing expansion of Blake's articulated perceptions of existential-being-unto death.....and the logically unexpressed interplay of feeling for meaning.....Plates 94-100 symbolises this best........Blake's extraordinary expansion of language units to render meaningful his experiences of four-fold perceptual realities is possibly unequaled in English....concepts like sytagmatic, paradigmatic and pragmatic discourse....all help....but none are sufficient unto themselves.

Indeed, central to Blake's mythic unity is that all aspects of creation.... rocks, hills, rivers, mountains, oceans, cities, counties and countries, zoas, emanations, sons and daughters are conscious entities in Blake's vision of life. .....this means, for example, that the traditional literary distinction between humanity as 'soul-invested' or as locke holds, 'intelligence' invested conscious and moral being, and environment as existentially alienated though aesthetically recaptured being, is dissolved by Blake.....how, in un-deconstructed critical methodologies does one distinguish between the 'character' of Urizen, Los, Jerusalem or Vala and the 'character' of Bath? or the 'character' of the Atlantic?......typically, critical methodologies are corralled by 'plotlessness' and impenetrability pre-suppositions as to be unable to interpret the developed characters of Blake...

.....the commonplace current critical position position is denial (see blog april 07)....Blake's figures and their characters are thought NOT to be dramatically 'fully developed' is based, I find, on a paradigmatic failure in the field to perceive the plot and therefore the detailed and intricate relations between the each figure's being and actions, and, the continuum of such acts after such acts to become and form a linear whole.....what i show is that there is the gamut of emotion feeling act, blindness and moral and spiritual epiphanic and insight in each figure in Blake's plot as a whole......

I read of Blake's figures as NOT being 'fully developed' characters.....and i think, 'compared to whom'?...... Homer's 'Ajax'.......Chaucer's 'wife of Bath'....Lear and the 'fool'?

the modernist and post-modern methodologies exhaust sensibility, and empties language and perception of all but sound and grammatical relations......the semiotics of marks of sound, the repetitions lifted into phonetics and into alphanumonic language of discourse........... all are replayed in Blake's deconstructed poetics.... for language is re-expressed....even re-invented...by Blake to shape the momentums of meanings that culminate in the almost impossible simplicities of his prophetic clarities.....

.....there is something wonderful in Blake's ideas of English 'the rough structure'...........he re-expresses the nature of sound 3000 odd years after its first mesopotanian cuniform sounds-before-consonants were lifted out from the hieroglyph into a written form......

so.....go to april 2007 in the blog and walk backwards into blog-time. when you want to read about the movement from thought into print in William Blake's The Four Zoas and Jerusalem Explained......

Saturday, 19 January 2008

Just a bit of print news......the final proof copy of William Blake's Jerusalem Explained is being printed now. There were lots of small errors my copy editor pointed to....typically, inter-textual references....so those were fixed.

I've contacted The Blake Society and joined.....the chairman Tim Heath, a very welcoming person, has helped make a youtube filmed celebration over Blake's grave....the location of which has been identified precisely....and is under the footpath!........this is very well-done, the church records were studied and the co-ordinates identified.......

it does little credit to see how this magnificent visionary 250 year anniversary remained so unrecognised.........not even a stamp.

However, the symbolic meaning and explanation of Jerusalem was finished to coincide with Blake's birthday, .........and is now available.......The William Blake Press: Cambridge is the publisher